The Present Age of Poetry
Note: I would consider this piece to be low confidence. I have not read the thousands of volumes of poetry necessary to ground the claims I make here, and my solutions are all highly speculative and probably wrong. My own poetry is not very good.
A poetic dark age cannot be perceived from within; it is only after the fact, that history reveals the shape of an age. But there are worrying signs that English language poetry today is not all sweetness and light. Strictly by the numbers, we have more poets than ever before in history and more books of poetry, but poetry itself is at a low point.
Most people do not pretend to read contemporary poetry. When a line is quoted, it is an old one. If one asks which of our present poets will be added to the canon, read in centuries hence, there is a clear lack of ready candidates and the best answer is usually that the canon itself is illegitimate. The widely respected and accomplished poets who can be safely trusted as high-status references are all recently dead. Seamus Heaney, John Ashbury, Mary Oliver, W.S. Merwin, and Maya Angelou have not been replaced by poets of similar status only a few decades younger. They came of age in the 50’s and 60’s, established reputations in their early career that was competitive with their immediate elders, and no one after has reached that status. This is not even unique to English, but seems to be the common post-war condition - Adonis and Bei Dao have no ready replacements; Forough Farrokhzad’s early death has not allowed others to occupy her place. Something is missing in the following generations. What happened?
One problem is surely competition. New media have overwhelmed the old, not just poetry. Reading books in general is less common, and as a healthy media diet has grown to include far more film, television, social media, and even video games, it is no surprise and not necessarily regrettable if poetry plays a smaller part in life. However the readers of poetry have not simply decreased, but have clustered, and this specific class of readers have steered the evolution of poetry in recent decades.
Poets write for poetry readers, most of whom are poets themselves, and many of whom have an academic position related to poetry. This is not in itself unusual, even if it seems that way from an English language perspective. Widespread literacy is not the norm in human history, and Tang or Heian scholar-poets were primarily writing for other Tang or Heian scholar-poets within the same tradition. What is perhaps unusual is the combination of a narrow audience and a deep belief in the inherent value of innovation. The Tang poets were innovating, but also strictly rooted in the traditions of Chinese verse, regularly quoting poems over a millennium old. The Romantic or the modernist poets placed high value on individual formal innovation and subject matter, but expanded their audience and sought new venues for their work, not relying on the approval of the previous generation for their own success. More recent poets have combined the two strands in the wrong way.
Some poets have spiraled into an incoherent permanent innovation based on the demands of their narrow academic audience. This has happened to visual art and western classical music as well, so it is worth looking at the common causes. The received 19th century tradition is one of experimentation and effective expansion of art’s domain. The Romantics and their successors created new forms, and the modernists went further, so therefore it is the postmodern imperative to go even further. But when one seeks to go even further towards a smaller audience (poets, composers, art collectors) and this smaller audience is fully professionalized, even studying the subject matter in detail for a PhD, bad incentives begin to set in. The avant-garde as that which is unintelligible except to the highly educated has been allowed to become the norm of consumption for these fields. It has produced works of difficult brilliance, especially by those who came of age in its first phases. But the process has accelerated well beyond these first fruits. Since then, mandatory innovation within the confines of academic orthodoxy has increased the difficulty of art but failed to deliver on brilliance.
There are plenty of poets who have not followed this particular path and their work is not difficult, but it still is not very good. Some understand the historical process of innovation to end at freedom from structure, and freedom to speak about themselves. The safest style now is a sort of confessional free verse, greatly enhanced if the person confessing has some sort of interesting hook to their identity. The autobiographical poet’s voice was a constructed identity for the ancients but is now the literal spoken voice of the author. This personal, literal voice written with line breaks and certain unfamiliar words has become the distinguishing mark of poetry. Some of this poetry is moving, as is any heightened autobiographical narrative, but it is rarely more than that. Ideas and subject matter and form are all theoretically open to authorial creativity, but because of poetry’s audience there are still unspoken rules. Emotions and topics are restricted to the liberal imagination, and gain prominence partially through relationships to liberal causes. Ultimate freedom has produced poetry that is mostly the same. This trend in poetry has shown no signs of producing better work over time.
These two styles, practiced largely through relationship to the university and poetic institutions and publishers form an orthodoxy. Everyone who has power in this world knows each other and if there are strong aesthetic disagreements between them, they are rarely made public. Poets are evaluated and elevated according to the judgements of this community, and eventually become judges themselves.
This is not rare, it is normal in the arts for dominant communities of tastemakers to form. A dull orthodoxy should not be an impediment to good poetry, and often isn’t. An established style can be been overthrown by a group of young outsiders. This has happened many times in the much-glorified recent past of European languages, and is the concrete inspiration for the obsession with innovation. But this has not happened, and has no signs of happening. Why are there not rebel poets who simply do not follow the path of an MFA or a PhD, and write something fresh and original?
Even if a young ambitious poet does not study with the university tastemakers and publishers, this group has effectively defined what poetry is. The existing journals, existing teachers, and even the existing translations are done in the same paradigm. Dissenters are common - poetry is becoming less popular every day - but such dissenters simply move into the new media which has taken away poetry’s readers in the first place. Anyone longing for a new style of poetry simply understands themselves not to like poetry, and therefore any new style would have no readers. Without readers or support of some kind, revolution is impossible. Anyone who publishes outside of support or institutions is an outsider artist and is safely ignored.
The current orthodoxy flexibly supports a huge variety of forms, though all of them are mediocre. One of the most successful poets of the last decades has been Coleman Barks, who rearranges translations of Rumi’s poetry into new-age liberal platitudes and sells them under the greater poet’s name. After Frost and Angelou, inaugural poets have had compelling and symbolic biographies, but only minor poetic impact, experiencing a brief rise in prominence with cultural politics followed by a quiet fall. The most recent selection, Amanda Gorman, was chosen for her youth and subject matter more than any indications of lasting quality. Slam poetry, a supposed youth revolution that should be exactly what English needs, is really just the musical aesthetics of rap with academic language around marginalization injected to make it acceptable as poetry. Rupi Kaur, even though she is decried by many of the tastemakers as an outsider, has taken the same confessional style from them and found a route to success with it through social media. None of these camps truly compete with each other; the paradigm holds, the possibilities shrink.
If it were easy to revolutionize English poetry, surely it would have already been done. There is a real possibility that among the infinite combinations of words in the English language, we have used up the best ones already. After all the rules of verse and form were broken by the modernists and early postmodernists, there are no more rules to break, and going backwards to new rules feels artificial and gimmicky. Poetry through natural evolution or some unfortunate consequences of an arbitrary modernity may have hit an inescapable dead end.
But if poetry can be revived, it should be.
Poetic dark ages happen through orthodoxies, and as a civilization it is worth investing in institutions which break this up. The tools and reality of conformity have advanced with globalization, and it might be worth deliberately trying to disrupt them.
We should have dozens of sources of funding for poetry and poets, and ideally they should all hate each other. We should have poets writing militarist epics, poets writing in bizarre hybrid metrical forms borrowed from Sanskrit and Bantu, poets writing in blank verse using only latinate vocabulary. The assumptions that innovation is good, natural language is good, that honest emotions are good all ought to be challenged. This will produce more failures than we are currently producing, but hopefully more success as well.
History is full of poetic golden ages, but the standards for a golden age are quite low. The finest times for poetry have featured low readership, low literacy, and the opportunity of authorship restricted to far fewer. The Greek lyric poets and the poets of the Shi Jing (詩經) never read each other, and their traditions stayed apart for thousands of years. Now should be the greatest age for poetry in human history, but we languish under the stagnation of a stable orthodoxy. We owe it to the future to build something better, and to write poetry that will last through all the ages.